Walter R. Mebane Jr, the election forensics expert who continues to wade through the official vote count from the Iranian elections has his starkest conclusion yet: that there was "extensive ballot box stuffing on Ahmadinejad's behalf."

Mebane, a professor at the University of Michigan, then goes further, suggesting that "[w]ithout the ballot-box stuffing fraud ... the election outcome should have been at least a runoff between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi."

His running analysis is here.

Public ratings of Pres. Barack Obama on the nation's top issues in the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll continue a pattern that has popped up in each of our polls since his inauguration in January: Obama's overall job approval is significantly higher than his ratings on individual issues.

One month in, his 68 percent job approval rating stood well above his 60 percent rating on the economy and 64 percent approval on filling his cabinet and other top administration positions. In March, readings on the economy (60 percent), federal budget deficit (52 percent) and international affairs (62 percent) were all below an overall approval rating of 66 percent. And 100 days in, Obama topped his 69 percent overall rating with 71 percent approval on handling the situation in Iraq, but ratings on the remaining 12 issues were lower than his overall approval.

The president's diplomatic efforts are the only ones that have consistently come close to his overall rating in these first months in office, perhaps on the strength of high expectations. In a December Post-ABC poll, 77 percent said that as president, Obama would be able to "improve America's image in the world." Since taking charge, his approval rating on handling "international affairs" has remained above 60 percent.

The trend is striking, but it is not necessarily unique. Looking back at Post-ABC polling conducted in the early months of the presidencies of George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, neither man consistently outpaced his approval rating on the domestic bellwethers of the economy, the budget or health care. But they did manage to fare well on international affairs broadly, and Clinton frequently topped his overall rating with approval of his handling of individual crises, such as the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, Somalia and Haiti. Bush twice exceeded his overall approval rating with his handling of education as he began the push for the "No Child Left Behind" act.

Obama's marks may lag behind his overall approval, but that doesn't mean he's doing poorly. He scores majority approval on all but two of the issues tested in the new poll, and notches approval ratings of 50 percent or higher among political independents on all but one - the situation involving the big U.S. automakers. Among all adults, just over a quarter (26 percent) said they approve of Obama on each of the five issues about which they were asked (each respondent was asked about the economy, health care and a random selection of three of the remaining issues rather than the full list), 41 percent said that they approve of his handling on at least four of five issues tested.

Among those who approve of the way Obama is handling his job generally, 31 percent disapprove of his handling of the situation involving the Big Three automakers and 24 percent disapprove of the way he's managed the federal budget deficit. More than four in 10 who approve of his overall performance break ranks and disapprove of his handling of at least one issue.

Approval ratings on each of the issues tested, plus breakdowns by party are below.

Q. Do you approve or disapprove of the way Obama is handling [item]? (% approve)

                                 ---Party ID----
                           All   Dem   Rep   Ind
International affairs      61    82    21    67
Threat of terrorism        57    78    27    55
Economy                    56    81    23    54
Global warming             54    78    29    52
Health care                53    80    17    50
Situation with Iran        52    65    35    53
Federal budget deficit     48    70    14    50
Situation involving the  
   big U.S. automakers     45    67    19    39

By Jon Cohen
New Post-ABC data on issues almost surely to come up at today's midday press conference:

Five months into his first term, Pres. Barack Obama maintains a high approval rating according to the new Washington Post-ABC News poll, outpacing his predecessor at this stage in his presidency.

Obama's ratings are nearly identical to former president George W. Bush's among his own partisans (Obama garners an 88 percent approval rating from Democrats, Bush held the same in June 2001 among Republicans) and the opposition (Obama scores a 26 percent among Republicans, Bush was at 29 percent among Democrats), the difference comes from independents: about two-thirds of independents approve of the job Obama is doing (65 percent) compared with about half who approved of Bush's handling of the presidency (52 percent). Former president Bill Clinton's approval ratings were lower across the board in June of his first year in office.

The new reading represents a slight decline from approval ratings at the 100-day-mark of Obama's presidency. Much of the change stems from a steep decline in approval from the loyal opposition: among Republicans, Obama's approval rating fell 10 points in the past two months, among conservative Republicans, it dropped 16 points.

Data from this Washington Post-ABC News poll can be found here.

                   -- Approve ---   - Disapprove -
                   NET   Strongly   NET   Strongly
All                65       36      29       22

Democrat           88       62       7        4
Republican         26        7      68       45
Independent        65       31      32       23

Liberal Dem        91       72       7        1
Mod/Con Dem        86       56       8        5
Mod/Lib Rep        45       15      47       29
Conserv. Rep       13        1      84       57

Liberal            87       57      11        5
Moderate           75       42      20       12
Conservative       40       16      55       42

Men                61       33      35       23
Women              68       39      28       20

White              60       29      36       25
Non-white          79       57      15        9

East               69       42      29       20
Midwest            69       32      26       19
South              59       36      35       25
West               64       35      32       20

Whites by region:
East               65       38      34       23
Midwest            69       30      29       21
South              49       21      46       34
West               62       34      33       19

18-29              71       33      23       13
30-39              66       39      32       21
40-49              67       39      27       21
50-64              61       35      37       26
65+                58       35      38       27

Non-college        65       33      30       20
College+           64       42      33       24

Among whites:
Non-college        59       25      37       25
College+           63       38      35       25

Household income:
<$50,000           67       34      30       20
$50,000+           62       38      32       23

Among whites:
<$50,000           61       24      37       25
$50,000+           60       34      35       25

Religion:
Wh. Evang. Prot.   38       14      56       41
Wh. Non-evang.
 Protestant        61       33      34       24
White Catholic     58       31      38       25
None               77       48      21       14

Union members      67       42      29       19

The election forensics expert who has been poring over the announced results of last week's controversial Iranian elections writes this morning that he is "no longer on the fence" about electoral irregularities there.

In an early morning update to his prelimary report on the election, Walter R. Mebane, Jr. notes: "I think the results give moderately strong support for a diagnosis that the 2009 [Iranian] election was affected by significant fraud."

Mebane, a professor at the University of Michigan, uses newly obtained town-level results from the election four years ago to predict this year's votes, and finds a "large number of outliers," instances where numbers do not make sense given the other outcomes.

In most of these cases, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did better than "natural political processes" would indicate, according to the updated paper. Among other assumptions, this model equates (politically, if not mathematically) 2005 votes for Ahmadinejad rival Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani to votes for 2009 challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi (or at least not Ahmadinejad).

This analysis adds a new diminension to the debate over the results, but is still well short of "hard evidence" of fraud, particularly given our limited understanding of voting behavior in Iran.

And all of this may miss a key point brought up by a reader in today's Post: in a letter-to-the-editor, John Cronin of Takoma Park writes that our search for "proof" through numbers may be misguided. "[W]hen an unelected ayatollah -- the "supreme leader," no less -- controls much of the media, the military and the courts, the whole state is effectively rigged," Cronin writes, "[i]t's hard to imagine any election being truly fair under such conditions, regardless of the extent to which the ballot boxes are stuffed."

Public opinion surveys are central to the Iranian opposition's argument that the elections there were rigged for incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: they cite unspecified polls showing the main challenger, Mir Hossein Mousavi with a "strong lead in the final days of the campaign," according to the New York Times.

Now, a competing poll conducted by two American groups is being used as part of the pushback. In an op-ed in today's Washington Post, Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty write-up the results of their telephone poll carried out in mid-May, showing Ahmadinejad ahead "by a more than 2 to 1 margin - greater than his actual apparent margin of victory in Friday's election."

The validity of the unreleased Iranian surveys cannot be assessed in detail, but a closer look at the one sponsored by Terror Free Tomorrow and the New America Foundation reveals ample reason to be skeptical of the conclusions drawn from it.

Methodologically, this survey passes muster as it's relatively straightforward to pull a good sample of the Iranian population, using the country's publicly available population counts and listed telephone exchanges. But the poll was conducted from May 11 to 20, well before the spike in support for Mousavi his supporters claim.

(See here for a summary of available Iran polls that finds some evidence for Mousavi momentum late in the campaign.)

More to the point, however, the poll that appears in today's op-ed shows a 2 to 1 lead in the thinnest sense: 34 percent of those polled said they'd vote for Ahmadinejad, 14 percent for Mousavi. That leaves 52 percent unaccounted for. In all, 27 percent expressed no opinion in the election, and another 15 percent refused to answer the question at all. Six Eight percent said they'd vote for none of the listed candidates; the rest for minor candidates.

One should be enormously wary of the current value of a poll taken so far before such a heated contest, particularly one where more than half of voters did not express an opinion.

With Virginia's Democratic gubernatorial primary just a few days away, a new poll from Suffolk University confirms one thing we know for sure about this race: there are a lot of undecided voters.

The new poll, conducted using live interviewers, adds to the stack of polling showing a large chunk of the potential electorate has not yet made up their mind on the contest, and those who express an opinion are fairly evenly divided, with no one candidate holding a statistically significant lead. More than one-fifth, 22 percent, of likely Democratic primary voters in the Suffolk poll said they are undecided, and half of those who did express support for a candidate said they are very or somewhat likely to change their minds before Tuesday's vote, meaning a combined 61 percent are uncertain of their vote.

Overall, the three candidates run nearly evenly: former state senator Creigh Deeds at 29 percent, former DNC chair and Clinton campaign veteran Terry McAuliffe at 26 percent and former state representative Brian Moran at 23 percent. But there is more air between the candidates among the 37 percent who said they are unlikely to switch candidates before Tuesday's vote. Deeds holds a slight lead among that group, 44 percent back him, compared with 34 percent who favor McAuliffe and 23 percent who back Moran.

Beyond the vote question, Suffolk's polling adds some much needed issue context and finds voters even less certain in their views of the candidates' attributes and abilities to handle the state's top problems than they are on the question of whom they support. Nearly half (48 percent) of likely voters were undecided on which of the three candidates could successfully address Virginia's transportation challenges and four in 10 (39 percent) weren't sure which had the best leadership skills to steer the commonwealth's economy in the right direction. Four in 10 were undecided on which of the three had the most experience to be governor (40 percent) or cares most about the problems of people like you (41 percent).

The high numbers of undecideds found in polling on this race - reputable and otherwise - may stem partly from the difficulty pollsters face in identifying likely voters. For this poll, Suffolk started from a registered voter list, asked those registered voters they reached how likely they were to vote and required that those voters be able to correctly name the primary date (including those who said June 9, next Tuesday or next week). But without an exit poll Tuesday, we'll be unlikely to know whether this poll has done a better job than any other at pegging likely voters; take it with the requisite grain of salt.

This poll was conducted by telephone June 1 through June 3 using live interviewers. Results include responses from 500 likely voters and have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4.4 percentage points. Error margins are larger among subgroups.

UPDATE: Another poll out today, this one from Research 2000 for the liberal blog Daily Kos, also finds the race near even with a large number of undecideds - Deeds at 30 percent, Moran at 27 and McAuliffe at 26 with 17 percent undecided - but adds one thing the Suffolk poll does not have: trend. In late May, the same poll found a vastly different race, with McAuliffe at 36 percent, Moran at 22 and Deeds lagging behind at 13 percent, suggesting the tides are moving in Deeds' direction across the state (he's climbed 16 points in Northern Virginia, 18 points in the rest of the state) as Election Day closes in.

The California Supreme Court today upheld Proposition 8, meaning the ban on gay marriage passed by California voters last November will stand. The ruling comes as public opinion appears to be shifting on gay marriage, but those movements have yet to translate into electoral wins for supporters of same-sex marriage.

Prop. 8 passed in November with 52 percent in favor, 48 percent opposed. And a Public Policy Institute of California poll (PDF) conducted in March of this year found residents of the Golden State still about evenly split on whether gay and lesbian couples should have the right to marry legally (44 percent said they favor it, 49 percent were against).

The same poll showed that opponents in California were far more likely than supporters of same-sex marriage to say the Supreme Court's ruling on Prop. 8 was "very important" to them, placing political intensity with the opponents. But time has been on the side of the supporters of gay marriage: opposition to gay marriage was significantly higher at the start of the decade, when 55 percent of Californians were against legalizing those unions.

Nationally, public support for legal recognition of same-sex couples has also been on the upswing, with a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll showing for the first time more in favor of legal marriage than opposed.

Underneath the overall trend is evidence the tide toward greater acceptance may continue: support for legal marriage of gay couples is significantly higher among younger adults - particularly those under age 30, nearly half of whom "strongly support" legal marriage - than it is among older Americans.

Despite the shift in public opinion, it's unclear whether the movement can gain success at the ballot box going forward. Initiatives or referenda seeking to ban gay marriage have won passage in 26 states since 1998, when Alaska voters approved the first such ballot measure, and in most cases these measures have succeeded by large margins, even in states with a more liberal bent such as Michigan and Oregon.

This week's release of the Parntership for Public Service's Best Places to Work index for 2009 rests on a compilation of data collected from federal workers, a unique group that's challenging to study.

Before the Office of Personnel Management's first Federal Human Capital Study (FHCS) conducted in 2002, very little research had been done on the attitudes of government workers. The first round of the FHCS was conducted at the initiative of OPM, but Congress soon made the practice of annual assessments of federal employees a legal requirement in the National Defense Authorization Act passed in Nov. 2003.

As Max Stier, President and CEO of the Partnership told me, "In the beginning there was a great deal of skepticism in government amongst the leadership that this was a good project. There was some sense that this would be used as a further way to beat up federal agencies."

He noted that attitudes have since changed, "those leaders understand that there's great value in it, that they can use it to better do their own job."

Much of that value, Stier says, comes from measuring performance and job satisfaction among employees of a sector for which there is no tangible, monetary measure of success. Unlike in the private sector, there are no profits or stock prices to guide outsiders in assessing the federal government's workforce. "You don't have those kinds of easy metrics in the public space," Stier said. "As a result if you're going to manage your organization well you need to find other ways to measure it."

And measuring it involves a massive data collection effort. More than 400,000 federal employees were randomly selected to participate in the FHCS, representing 62 agencies and 216 sub-agencies that employ around 97 percent of the executive branch workforce, upwards of 1.6 million workers.

Most of the 212,223 who completed the survey did so online and employees were notified via e-mail that they had been selected to participate, though some were ultimately issued paper questionnaires. Interviewing was conducted in August and September 2008.

Overall, 51 percent of those invited completed the questionnaire, though response rates varied by agency from a low of 35 percent from the Broadcasting Board of Governors up to a high of 79 percent at the Small Business Administration.

Over time, the survey has become a catalyst for government managers to improve satisfaction within their agencies, Stier said. "I don't think there's anything more powerful than what your employees have to say about your organization."

Check out more Post coverage of the index from Joe Davidson, Steve Vogel, and Ed O'Keefe.

The Pew Research Center's invaluable political values survey is just out, emphasizing the continued growth in political independents, a group that appears increasingly conflicted about the role of government.

The new poll's sweeping questionnaire allows an updated look at the impact the growth in independent voters and corresponding decline among partisans could have on the nation's ideological leanings as the Obama presidency unfolds. This is particularly true on views of government, as the report notes: "The political values of independents are mixed and run counter to orthodox liberal and conservative thinking about government."

The Center's analysis used 13 indices to gauge public opinion on a range of issue areas. As partisan opinions have grown apart on many topics, independents, who have grown as a share of the population, have not moved consistently in one ideological direction.

(In 2007, the Post, along with our partners at the Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University School of Public Health, conducted an in-depth survey of independent voters, finding a politically diverse group, whose impact would prove critical in the 2008 election.)

On questions of the social safety net and equal opportunities and rights, independents have shifted toward traditional Republican positions, while on broader role of government questions, independents hew more closely to the Democratic point of view. Independents also tend to lean closer to Democrats on issues including regulation of the free market, social values, religiosity and national security, but are more apt to agree with Republicans on government responsiveness.

While independents on the whole remain a relatively centrist bunch, partisans in the poll have grown markedly further apart. The average difference between Republican and Democratic responses to a range of values questions stands at 16 percentage points, the highest level in surveys dating back to 1987.

That mirrors a trend evident in exit polling dating back to the mid-1970s: A steady climb in ideological alignment among partisans. Nearly four in 10 Democrats voting in the 2008 election considered themselves liberal, tying the previous high of 39 percent in 2004, while among Republicans, 64 percent who voted in 2008 considered themselves conservative, the highest level in any modern exit poll.

The Pew Center's survey provides a broad, baseline measure on partisan and ideological views at the outset of the "Obama era." Whether the trendlines continue to move Obama's way will determine whether that era ends in 2012 or beyond.